Introduction to Anthony McCall + Mark Fell installation

Anthony McCall’s “Face to Face II” and Mark Fell’s “Slicing a Torus” are two autonomous and independent works, one visual and the other sonorous, which are presented in the same space, activating it simultaneously. Through a permanent dialogue, both works converge in an expanded phenomenological experience that visitors can modify by moving through the room.

“Face to Face II” is a “solid light” installation, a resource that Anthony McCall inaugurated in 1973 with “Line Describing a Cone” and he currently develops by using digital tools. Following the same conceptual principles of the first expanded cinema works made by McCall in the seventies, this installation examines the sculptural possibilities of light through a series of moving lines projected on two screens. Through the artificial fog that fills the room, the projected lines acquire the form of a series of luminous volumes with which visitors can interact freely.

The title of McCall’s work references the placement of its different elements in space and to the fact that both screens are located one in front of the other, as if they were looking face to face. Each of the two projectors, located in the corners of the room, is oriented towards the screen at the other side. Between one screen and the other, the interaction with the three-dimensional forms of light is intersubjective, that is to say, the movements of a person serve to create his / her own experience of the work and, at the same time, modify that of the rest of visitors. At both ends of the room, however, the retro-projected lines appear on the reverse side of the screens in their original two-dimensional shape and the visitors remain in the position of passive spectators.

“Face to Face II” is presented here together with the work that Mark Fell created especially for the occasion, entitled “Slicing a Torus”. This generative composition for eight loudspeakers reproduces the sound of sixty-five virtual oscillators that modify their pitch based on the numeric information obtained from an algorithm that reproduces the action of performing several “slices” in a torus (or what is commonly called “doughnut”). Fell’s multi-channel composition also invites visitors to move around the space and to listen from different points in the room, creating their own experience in movement of the piece. As with McCall’s work, the screens help to create various sonic areas within the room.

In addition to sharing this interactive character, both “Face to Face II” and “Slicing a Torus” are the result of an exploration of geometry, which, as proposed by Fell, we could perhaps call “transdimensional.” Both works start or base part of their process in a two-dimensional form (the lines projected in the case of McCall, the “numerically translated slices” of the torus in that of Fell’s) to give rise, in each case, to a fully three-dimensional space. These two three-dimensional spaces overlap and collapse into a third that would seem to belong to a ghostly geometric regime where our body lies half way or above the visual and visual experience; between two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality or beyond both.